by Gary Mintchell | Jan 10, 2018 | Operations Management, Software
Can only large companies with plenty of funds afford an MES? Are small and medium sized manufacturers destined to be stuck in the complexity of Microsoft Excel for ever?
MES can be quite an involved undertaking for a large company. Engineers and IT professionals must rationalize operations bringing intellectual coherence to them. Transactions must be defined and understood. Existing applications must be sorted through and organized. Even for a smaller company it takes a lot of work. Some companies seem to strive for complexity in applications.
New products, especially that follow some of the trends of affordability and ease-of-use, interest me.
I was recently approached by a technologist from Estonia who had heard my podcasts and figured I’d be interested in his company’s new product—Katana MRP. [Note: the term takes me back to my early years in IT software installing MRP II. I didn’t ask about the name. But translations into English sometimes get interesting.]
Katana MRP is a manufacturing and inventory management software for small and medium sized manufacturers. The software is cloud and subscription based. Affordable for even the smallest makers/manufacturers (Plans starting from $39/mo. The main value stands in the simplicity of use.
Among the benefits to the manufacturer include better stock level optimizations and manufacturing planning leading to less time spent on operations and more time to product development or selling/marketing.
My contact, Oliver Vesi, told me, “The feedback from over 500 users shows that a lot of the value stands in the easy-to-grasp interface that makes the state of your stock and manufacturing perfectly clear. The second best outlined value is integrations. Katana MRP integrates with the most used accounting and e-commerce platforms, so the sales data and stock needs run in and out automatically.”
Following is a list of main features.
MANUFACTURING
Manufacturing grid. Track the status of each manufacturing order from material planning to production execution. Complete overview of your production pipeline.
Material availability. Have control over the availability of materials required for fulfilling each manufacturing order. Take necessary action by purchasing more materials or changing the priority of orders.
Production planning. Set priorities of orders and manage tasks for your shop floor personnel.
SALES & PURCHASING
Sales grid. Track the status of each sales order from order creation to delivery. Manage material availability for each order and conveniently create required manufacturing orders. Get a complete overview of your sales order fulfillment pipeline.
Manage sales and purchase orders. Each order can be edited to include information on customer or supplier, items, quantities, sales or purchase prices, tax levels etc. All your sales and purchase orders are accessible from one place.
WAREHOUSE
Automatic inventory management. Your inventory levels update automatically based on your sales, purchasing and manufacturing activities. Calculate costs using moving-average-cost reflecting all purchase and manufacturing related expenses.
Real-time inventory control. Make inventory decisions based on the quantity of products and materials you have available for sales or manufacturing. Control in hand, committed, and expected stock amounts in real time.
Stock level optimization. Set an optimal reorder point for each product and material. Make procurement or manufacturing decisions based on optimal stock level calculations.
PORTFOLIO
Product and material cards. Each product and material can be edited to include information on category, product code, variants, reorder point etc. All your portfolio items are accessible from one place.
Variants. Each product and material can include variants such as colour, size or material. Manage a wide portfolio effectively via variants.
Production recipe (bill-of-materials). Keep track of costs and quantities of all your materials required for assembling a product.
Production operations (routing). Specify the steps that are used to manufacture a product. Calculate costs related to production labour.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 9, 2018 | Data Management, Software
I don’t really think about report tools that much, to be honest. Maybe because most people seem to default to Microsoft Excel to draw information from their operations information system.
Roy Kok has been VP of sales and marketing for Ocean Data Systems / Dream Report for some time now. He’s an industry veteran whom I’ve known for probably 20 years. We’ve had occasion to chat about his product several times over the past few months. So, I had to ask, just what do you do and what kind of market is there—really?
[Note: He’s a new sponsor of the site, trying us out for a while. I don’t actively go out and sell ads, but I certainly appreciate the companies that do—hint. I actually probed about the market before he decided to buy.]
I guess I never thought about a custom report writer in the same genre as dashboards and other visibility tools. I stand corrected.
Kok tells me, “I believe Dream Report to be the number one product of this type in the world. We are currently shipping in the thousands per year. As you can imagine, this is giving us great market penetration and visibility, but Dream Report is not a very expensive product, so our company is still relatively small at 18 employees. Dream Report is all that we do, so from that perspective, we are a significant scale for a single product company. I believe we hold 5% or so market share. 85% market share is held by business products being applied to industrial applications. These products include Crystal Reports, Microsoft SSRS and Excel. That would leave 10% for the plethora of other tools, vertical market solutions, and smaller competitors.”
Why did this market become so dominated by business tools? “One simple word – History,” added Kok. “In the late 80s and early 90s, HMI/SCADA was still in its infancy and competition was tremendous. Vendor focus was on reliability and capability of HMI/SCADA. There was another invention at that same time – ODBC – in the business world. ODBC was the way third party products could interact with databases of all types. Also in the late 80s, Crystal Reports came on the market and in the early 90s, Microsoft delivered SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services). Excel was also available and leveraged ODBC. The result of all these developments was that HMI/SCADA vendors chose to enhance their products with ODBC and could thus leverage the variety of business tools on the market. That set the path for most of the industrial market. To be fair, some HMI/SCADA vendors dabbled in report generation, typically focused on connectivity too their own products.”
This becomes part of the IT / OT situation. Part of the continual divide between the organizations lies in the tools each use. Both thrive on information, but the type of information and its format is different between the two areas. Often business tools are much more expensive, since the cost can be spread over a much larger application framework. Kok posits that OT people have been hesitant to look at report applications from fear of cost and complexity. Therefore, the benefit of his product.
Adds Kok, “Our challenge is to re-educate the world that reports are easy to create and are actually your shortest path to continuous improvement. A report (or dashboard) can be fast and easy to create. It can then be scheduled for automatic generation and delivery. We argue that the step after installing a historian, should be the installation of a report and dashboard solution like Dream Report. Then, when KPIs go askew, you can use Dream Report analytics or other advanced tools to better understand the root cause. Dream Report can actually bridge the gap and help to justify advanced analytics like those from Seeq, Falkonry, TrendMiner, Tableau, Pentaho, and others.
And that, I think, is the next step forward—how to integrate advanced analytics into OT in a sensible and useful way. We keep talking about predictive maintenance. And have been for many years. Maybe that one really begins hitting. And we’ll watch for which application strikes next.
Ocean Data Systems has been growing organically since 2006. Major OEMs private labelling and reselling Dream Report include Schneider Electric, Wonderware, GE, Eurotherm, Indusoft.) Here is a short video.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 13, 2017 | Automation, Internet of Things, Operations Management
An interesting, and at times intense, discussion has risen over the past couple of years in information communication circles between OPC UA and MQTT proponents. Some see a competition between the technologies while others (me) see complimentary technologies enabling engineers the flexibility to develop the communication application that best suits their needs.
Kepware, a PTC business, is a leading supplier of OPC development tools. Its newly released version 6.4 of KEPServerEX now includes an MQTT Client driver. Inclusion of this new driver enables users to collect data from sensor networks and other devices that utilize MQTT—and make that data available to the industrial automation devices and applications they rely on to run their plants efficiently.
“Many KEPServerEX users are now acquiring industrial data in their operational environments through new intelligent sensors and open-source or lightweight devices,” said Jeff Bates, Kepware Product Manager. “The MQTT Client driver and KEPServerEX seamlessly integrate data from these devices—enabling users to access new real-time data and provide a robust view of their plant floor operations.”
The MQTT Client driver included in KEPServerEX version 6.4 offers users a commercially available out-of-the-box MQTT to OPC UA translator. It uses innovative parsing tools to enable users to create tags from popular devices that utilize MQTT. With this new driver, KEPServerEX is able to securely subscribe to MQTT topics through any MQTT broker, receive updates as new device data is published, and make that data available over a variety of protocols.
“The enhancements in KEPServerEX version 6.4 are extremely valuable to any customer whose devices utilize the MQTT protocol, including customers of Wzzard Wireless Sensing Solutions,” said Mike Fahrion, CTO and VP of IoT Technologies at Advantech B+B SmartWorx. “There are significant benefits to making IoT Sensor data available in traditional industrial automation applications, and that is now possible with KEPServerEX.”
Along with the MQTT Client driver, KEPServerEX version 6.4 includes:
- Siemens TCP/IP Ethernet Driver Read/Write Enhancements: Enables users of Siemens TCP/IP Ethernet drivers with Siemens S7-400 and S7-1500 controllers to perform read/writes more efficiently by configuring their Packet Data Unit (PDU) size up to the maximum levels supported by the controller. Users can now easily monitor high-fidelity data with high tag counts and high data change rates.
- Store And Forward Capabilities With The ThingWorx Native Interface: Enables users to reliably transmit data between KEPServerEX and ThingWorx—even in the event of network instability. During communication disruptions between KEPServerEX and ThingWorx, the store and forward service collects data that ThingWorx had been requesting. Upon reconnection, the stored data is automatically forwarded to ThingWorx.
- CODESYS Ethernet Driver Tag Browsing Capabilities: Users of the CODESYS Ethernet driver now have the option to select and import only relevant tags into their KEPServerEX projects. This enables users to more efficiently connect to and start streaming data from CODESYS devices.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 20, 2017 | Automation, Commentary, Podcast
Last week was Rockwell Automation week. I have one more major manufacturer show for the year—Discover Madrid with Hewlett Packard Enterprise next week.
I recorded a quick podcast recap of the week. I have so much material to digest, that I am still working through it.
Three quick points:
1. There was no discussion of the Emerson proposed acquisition of Rockwell. [My view after a few hallway conversations-very few-is that David Farr, Emerson’s CEO, needs to do something drastic to improve his performance. Emerson has been divesting lately, and his performance is below that of his legendary predecessor. He catches Rockwell with a CEO who have been in office just a little over a year. Maybe he thought he could surprise Moret and get a steal? What if the board prefers Moret to run the combined Emerson Rockwell company? Farr as chairman and Moret as CEO? Weird but interesting thought.]
2. Rockwell’s training is rigorous and thorough. I’ve been through at least 5 classes myself (controls, PLCs, drives, motor control centers, software). I know. Interesting and moving presentation on a joint effort of Manpower and Rockwell training veterans for second careers.
3. Open and scalable. I spent an hour learning about Rockwell’s new adoption of OPC UA. Then at least 1.5 hours on Rockwell software where the key word is scalable. The new analytics application appears to be well done and powerful (I only saw a demo during the keynotes and had some conversations, but it looked good).
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Overcast or you favorite pod catcher. I’d really appreciate a good rating and some referrals. It has a good audience considering the size of the market.
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 23, 2017 | Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Remember several years ago when Amazon started selling space and time on its servers? And people thought they were crazy. Is this a business?
Well, as the old vaudeville comedian and TV pioneer Jimmy Durante used to say, “Everybody wants to get into the act.”
We have lots of “–as-a-service” things going on over the past 15 years or so. Software, Application, Platform. Here Rockwell Automation leverages its partnerships with Cisco, Panduit, and Microsoft (who has its own Infrastructure-as-a-Service) to offer an extension to its longtime strategy of using Ethernet as a networking backbone to its Connected Enterprise vision.
Designing, deploying and maintaining this infrastructure can be complex and time consuming for many companies, and is often too costly for their capital budgets. Rockwell Automation has introduced its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering to address these challenges.
Rockwell’s IaaS reduces the burden of network deployments by combining pre-engineered network solutions, on-site configuration and 24/7 remote monitoring into a single five-year contract. The result is simplified ordering and commissioning upfront, and can help improve network reliability long term. The service can also ease budgetary strains by shifting networking costs from a capital expense to an operating expense.
Rockwell’s Solution
All aspects of IaaS are aligned to the Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) reference architectures developed by Rockwell Automation and Cisco. Leveraging best-in-class technologies and architectures, companies can optimize their network infrastructure’s performance, efficiency and uptime, as well as address security risks.
“Companies of all sizes are eager to digitally transform their operations in a Connected Enterprise, but many are limited in their ability to connect their infrastructure,” said Sherman Joshua, connected services portfolio manager, Rockwell Automation. “Often, a combination of time, talent and budgetary constraints hold them back. IaaS helps relieve these pressures by combining turnkey networking solutions with our highest level of support.”
IaaS is offered with two Rockwell Automation pre-engineered network solutions, including the Industrial Data Center (IDC) and the Industrial Network Distribution Solution (INDS). These solutions are designed for industrial use and incorporate industry-leading technologies from Rockwell Automation Strategic Alliance partners Cisco, Panduit and Microsoft.
The IDC provides all the hardware and software needed to transition to a virtualized environment, and is designed to deliver high availability and fault tolerance. The INDS is a network distribution package that helps end users achieve secure, high-capacity connectivity between the control room and throughout the plant floor.
Under an IaaS contract, Rockwell Automation will size, assemble and test the infrastructure, including configuration and on-site deployment at the customer’s facility. Contracts include 24/7 remote monitoring of critical system parameters to help prevent outages and failures, as well as proactive system maintenance and checks to improve reliability. Support response is guaranteed within 10 minutes, but actual response times average three minutes.
